Trump is losing control of the people’s revolution and now anything is possible
The revolution has not come for Donald Trump – yet. That day does have an air of increasing inevitability, spurred on by reports that this administration, bogged down by endless and wholly preventable scandal, is careering out of his control. It also has the tidy logic of Greek myths: man creates revolution; revolution destroys man.
But the story of the year since Trump won the election, the anniversary of which falls this week, bears little resemblance to those myths, with their heroic figures and neat story arcs. This is a story of paralysis, of small men in an era which casts about for great ones. Where we will end up is, at this point, not entirely clear.
It is also a story of genuine revolution, of people rising up and saying “enough – anything, and anyone, would be better than this”. Some have posited that if Trump’s administration fails to deliver on what it has promised, those people will recede back into middle America and disengage with the political process again and everything will return to normal. I disagree: now that they have realised that they can wield fire, they are unlikely to give it back to the gods.
Last November (and the March of that year, when it became mathematically improbable for anyone besides Trump to win the Republican nomination), we saw a reaction to a system of governance which has, over decades, slipped further and further away from the people it was designed to represent. It was allowed to survive because a majority, however slim, was generally contented with the direction in which the country was moving, and those who found themselves unhappy also believed that they were alone.
In Trump, the angry and disillusioned found someone who sympathised with their struggles, who promised them solutions, and who assured them that they were most certainly not alone. However, this was not, and is not, Trump’s revolution; it is a spontaneous groundswell of support for the idea that government should have solutions for its citizens’ problems. Trump has found that question, but is still struggling to provide a cogent answer. Giving him ownership of this movement is like crediting the tide to a surfer who manages to catch a single wave. He was simply in the right place at the right time.
He owes his current position to his canny understanding of the American zeitgeist, and his current troubles to his nonexistent political instincts. He understands, in short, what people want, but has no realistic prospect of getting it to them. Pending criminal investigations aside, this is where the real danger lies for his presidency. If Trump simply becomes part of the system that has failed so many, he will be rapaciously devoured by this movement, which he neither controls nor fully understands. Steve Bannon, his erstwhile adviser, considers himself its architect and is already waging a guerrilla war against established Washington, including incumbents favoured by the president. The breakneck pace of the president’s Twitter feed belies the reality of his
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion existence in Washington, a cheerless slog through the motions of governing that has failed to produce much in the way of governance. His penchant for on-the-spot decision making and a hysterical press corps have created the impression that everything is happening at once, and that everything has changed. In reality, almost nothing has.
For those who have listened to his speeches and then felt the immediate urge to find the bottom of a bottle, this might seem like cause for celebration. But Trump is hardly the most extreme of his ilk, and many more of them are likely to see election night victories in the mid-terms next November if the core of Trump’s base cannot be convinced the ship has been righted.
When the average American looks at Washington, they see a game that has been rigged; if one can buy an election and then set the rate of one’s own taxes, how could the system be fair, and how could an ordinary person get ahead? Trump correctly identified these key structural issues, and quickly became popular by pointing out that gradual reforms would not suffice – the whole system needed to be turned on its head.
Delivering tax reform will be a tall order; getting a constitutional amendment ratified that would get money out of politics will be nigh on impossible. But the country does not require small or simple solutions, nor will it accept those politicians who content themselves with piecemeal change. There is still time for this president to change the narrative about himself; he is not yet consigned to the dustbin of history.
Molly Kiniry is a researcher at the Legatum Institute
Prince William has been woefully misunderstood. His fretting about the “terrible impact” of Africa’s growing population on wildlife last week was criticised as Neo-Malthusianism of the worst sort: a misanthropic lament at there being “too many people in the world”. But read his words closely and you’ll see it was nothing of the sort. Avoiding the hateful nostalgia of those who would rather Africa poor, empty and undeveloped, so long as carbon emissions are lower and there are enough wild animals to keep safari tourists happy, his simple point was that there are consequences to a larger population and it’s sensible to mitigate them.
If only Stephen Hawking were so reasonable. The cosmologist has taken a keen interest in the apocalypse of late, and has said that the world is in danger of “self-destructing” unless the global population stops increasing “at an alarming rate”.
Coming from a scientist, this is bizarre. As the economist Bjørn Lomborg points out, having peaked in the Sixties, the global rate of population increase is now at its lowest in 65 years and growth is likely to end altogether by the end of the century. Fine, it is now increasingly focused on Africa and the Middle East. But from Thomas Malthus to Paul Ehrlich, every previous population panic has turned out fine, with people sufficiently ingenious in everything
If Trump simply becomes part of the system which has failed so many, he will be rapaciously devoured by this movement
Every previous population panic has turned out fine, with people sufficiently ingenious in everything from food production to environmental stewardship to thrive
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion